The Intelligence Trap_ Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes

As they nervously sat down for their tests, the children in
Lewis Terman’s study can’t have imagined that their results would forever change
their lives—or world history.* Yet each, in their own
way, would come to be defined by their answers, for good and bad, and their own
trajectories would permanently change the way we understand the human mind.

One of the brightest was Sara Ann, a six-year-old with a gap
between her front teeth, and thick spectacles. When she had finished scrawling
her answers, she casually left a gumdrop in between her papers—a small bribe,
perhaps, for the examiner. She giggled when the scientist asked her whether “the
fairies” had dropped it there. “A little girl gave me two,” she explained
sweetly. “But I believe two would be bad for my digestion because I am just well
from the flu now.” She had an IQ of 192—at the very top of the spectrum.1

Joining her in the intellectual stratosphere was Beatrice, a
precocious little girl who began walking and talking at seven months. She had
read 1,400 books by the age of ten, and her own poems were apparently so mature
that a local San Francisco newspaper claimed they had “completely fooled an
English class at Stanford,” who mistook them for the works of Tennyson. Like
Sara Ann, her IQ was 192.2

Then there was eight-year-old
Shelley Smith—“a winsome child, loved by everyone”; her face apparently glowed
with suppressed fun.3 And Jess
Oppenheimer—“a conceited, egocentric boy” who struggled to communicate with
others and lacked any sense of humor.4 Their IQs hovered
around 140—just enough to make it into Terman’s set, but still far above
average, and they were surely destined for great things.

Up to that point, the IQ test—still a relatively new
invention—had been used mostly to identify people with learning difficulties.
But Terman strongly believed that these few abstract and academic traits—such as
memory for facts, vocabulary, and spatial reasoning skills—represent an innate
“general intelligence” that underlies all your thinking abilities. Irrespective
of your background or education, this largely innate trait represented a raw
brainpower that would determine how easily you learn, understand complex
concepts, and solve problems.

“There is nothing about an individual as important as his IQ,”
he declared at the time.5 “It is of the
highest 25% of our population, and more especially to the top 5%, that we must
look for the production of leaders who will advance science, art, government,
education, and social welfare generally.”

By tracking the course of their lives over the subsequent
decades, he hoped that Sara Ann, Beatrice, Jess, and Shelley and the other
“Termites” were going to prove his point, predicting their success at school and
university, their careers and income, and their health and well-being; he even
believed that IQ would predict their moral character.

The results of Terman’s studies would permanently establish the
use of standardized testing across the world. And although many schools do not
explicitly use Terman’s exam to screen children today, much of our education
still revolves around the cultivation of that narrow band of skills represented
in his original test.

If we are to explain why smart people act foolishly, we must
first understand how we came to define intelligence in this way, the abilities
this definitio" id="page_13">

problem solving, but which have been completely
neglected in our education system. Only then can we begin to contemplate the
origins of the intelligence trap—and the ways it might also be solved.

We shall see that many of these blind spots were apparent to
contemporary researchers as Terman set about his tests, and they would become
even more evident in the triumphs and failures of Beatrice, Shelley, Jess, Sara
Ann, and the many other “Termites,” as their lives unfolded in sometimes
dramatically unexpected ways. But thanks to the endurance of IQ, we are only
just getting to grips with what this means and the implications for our decision
making.

Indeed, the story of Terman’s own life reveals how a great
intellect could backfire catastrophically, thanks to arrogance, prejudice—and
love.

As with many great (if misguided) ideas, the germs of this
understanding of intelligence emerged in the scientist’s childhood.

“I think the prediction probably added a little to my
self-confidence and caused me to strive for a more ambitious goal than I might
otherwise have set,” Terman later wrote.7

By the time he was accepted for a prestigious position at
Stanford University in 1910, Terman would long have known that phrenology was a
pseudoscience; there was nothing in the lumps of his skull that could reflect
his abilities. But he still had the strong suspicion that intelligence was some
kind of innate characteristic that would mark out your path in life, and he had
now found a new yardstick to measure the difference between the “feeble-minded”
and the “gifted.”

The object of Terman’s fascination was a test developed by
Alfred Binet, a celebrated psychologist in fin de siècle
Paris. In line with the French Republic’s principle of égalité among all citizens, the government had recently
introduced compulsory education for all children between the ages of six and
thirteen. Some children simply failed to respond to the opportunity, however,
and the Ministry of Public Instruction faced a dilemma. Should these “imbeciles”
be educated separately within the school? Or should they be moved to asylums?
Together with Théodore Simon, Binet invented a test that would help teachers to
measure a child’s progress and adjust their education accordingly.8

To a modern reader, some of the questions may seem rather
absurd. As one test of vocabulary, Binet asked children to examine drawings of
women’s faces and judge which was “prettier” (see image below). But many of the
tasks certainly did reflect crucial skills that would be essential for their
success in later life. Binet would recite a string of numbers or words, for
example, and the child had to recall them in the correct order to test their
short-term memory. Another question would ask them to form a sentence with three
given words—a test of their verbal prowess.

Binet himself was under no illusions that his test captured
the full breadth of “intelligence”; he believed our “mental worth” was simply
too amorphous to be measured on a single scale and he balked at the idea that a
low score should come to define a child’s future opportunities, believing that
it could be malleable across the lifetime.9 “We must protest
and react against this brutal pessimism,” he wrote; “we must try to show that it
is founded on nothing.”10

But other psychologists, including Terman, were already
embracing the concept of “general intelligence”—the idea that there is some kind
of mental “energy” serving the brain, which can explain your performance in all
kinds of problem solving and academic learning.11 If you are
quicker at mental arithmetic, for instance, you are also more likely to be able
to read well and to remember facts better. Terman believed that the IQ test would capture that raw brainpower,
predetermined by our heredity, and that it could then predict your overall
achievement in many different tasks throughout life.12

And so he set about revising an English-language version of
Binet’s test, adding questions and expanding the exam for older children and
adults, with questions such as:

If 2 pencils cost 5 cents, how many pencils can
you buy for 50 cents?

And:

What is the difference between laziness and
idleness?

Besides revising the questions, Terman also changed the way
the result was expressed, using a simple formula that is still used today. Given
that older children would do better than younger children, Terman first found
the average score for each age. From these tables, you could assess a child’s
“mental age,” which, when divided by their actual age and multiplied by 100,
revealed their “intelligence quotient.” A ten-year-old thinking like a
fifteen-year-old would have an IQ of 150; a ten-year-old thinking like a
nine-year-old, in contrast, would have an IQ of 90. At all ages, the average
would be 100.†

Many of Terman’s motives were noble: he wanted to offer an
empirical foundation to the educational system so that teaching could be
tailored to a child’s ability. But even at the test’s conception, there was an
unsavoury streak in Terman’s thinking, as he envisaged a kind of social
engineering based on the scores. Having profiled a small group of “hoboes,” for
instance, he believed the IQ test could be used to separate delinquents from
society, before they had even committed a
crime.13 “Morality,” he wrote, “cannot flower and fruit if
intelligence remains infantile.”14

Thankfully Terman never realized these plans, but his research
caught the attention of the US Army during the First World War, and they used
his tests to assess 1.75 million soldiers. The brightest were sent straight to
officer training, while the weakest were dismissed from the army or consigned to
a labor battalion. Many observers believed that the strategy greatly improved
the recruitment process.

Carried by the wind of this success, Terman set about the
project that would dominate the rest of his life: a vast survey of California’s
most gifted pupils. Beginning in 1920, his team set about identifying the crème de la crème of California’s biggest cities. Teachers
were encouraged to put forward their brightest pupils, and Terman’s assistants
would then test their IQs, selecting only those children whose scores surpassed
140 (though they later lowered the threshold to 135). Assuming that intelligence
was inherited, his team also tested these children’s siblings, allowing them to
quickly establish a large cohort of more than a thousand gifted children in
total—including Jess, Shelley, Beatrice, and Sara Ann.

Over the next few decades, Terman’s team continued to follow the
progress of these children, who affectionately referred to themselves as the
“Termites,” and their stories would come to define the way we judge genius for
almost a century. Termites who stood out include the nuclear physicist Norris
Bradbury; Douglas McGlashan Kelley, who served as a prison psychiatrist in the
Nuremberg trials; and the playwright Lilith James. By 1959, more than thirty had
made it into Who’s Who in America, and nearly eighty were
listed in American Men of Science.15

Not all the Termites achieved great academic success, but many
shone in their respective careers nonetheless. Consider Shelley Smith—“the
winsome child, loved by everyone.” After dropping out of Stanford University,
she forged a career as a researcher and reporter at Life
magazine, where she met and married the photographer Carl Mydans.16
Together they traveled around Europe and Asia reporting on political tensions in
the build-up to the Second World War; she would later recall days running
through foreign streets in a kind of reverie at
the sights and sounds she was able to capture.17

Jess Oppenheimer, meanwhile—the “conceited, egocentric child”
with “no sense of humor”—eventually became a writer for Fred Astaire’s radio
show.18 Soon he was earning such vast sums that he found it
hard not to giggle when he mentioned his own salary.19
His luck would only improve when he met the comedian Lucille Ball, and together
they produced the hit TV show I Love Lucy. In between the
script writing, he tinkered with the technology of filmmaking, filing a patent
for the teleprompter still used by news anchors today.

Those triumphs certainly bolster the idea of general
intelligence; Terman’s tests may have only examined academic abilities, but they
did indeed seem to reflect a kind of “raw” underlying brainpower that helped
these children to learn new ideas, solve problems, and think creatively,
allowing them to live fulfilled and successful lives regardless of the path they
chose.

And Terman’s studies soon convinced other educators. In 1930, he
had argued that “mental testing will develop to a lusty maturity within the next
half century . . . within a few score years schoolchildren from the kindergarten
to the university will be subjected to several times as many hours of testing as
would now be thought reasonable.”20 He was right, and
many new iterations of his test would follow in the subsequent decades.

Besides examining vocabulary and numerical reasoning, the later
tests also included more sophisticated nonverbal conundrums, such as the
quadrant on the following page.

The answer relies on you being able to think abstractly and see
the common rule underlying the progression of shapes—which is surely reflective
of some kind of advanced processing ability. Again, according to the idea of
general intelligence, these kinds of abstract reasoning skills are meant to
represent a kind of “raw brainpower”—irrespective of your specific
education—that underlies all our thinking.

Our education may teach us specialized knowledge in many
different disciplines, but each subject ultimately relies on those more basic
skills in abstract thinking.

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